Renaissance Diplomacy

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RENAISSANCE DIPLOMACY

by

GARRETT MATTINGLY

DEDICATION

TO

BERNARD DE VOTO

TO WHOM FOR A LONG TIME

I HAVE ALWAYS BROUGHT MY HARDEST PROBLEMS.

AND NEVER IN VAIN.

FOREWORD

SOMEWHAT more than thirty years ago the studies out of which this book has grown were begun at Harvard University under the guidance of Roger Bigelow Merriman. I then intended a history of Anglo-Spanish diplomatic relations in the sixteenth century. An alert reader may be able to detect, in the frequency with which illustrations from the Spanish embassy in England occur in some of the following chapters, a trace of that original plan, but there is really very little of it left.

Work on it was interrupted by other interests, by personal distractions and by those intrusions of current events which have disarranged most people’s lives in the recent past. Each time I took up the manuscript again I found that its interest for me had changed, that I was asking different questions and being obliged to range always further afield for answers. Spreading out so far, of course, has increased the danger of error in fact and in interpretation. I can only plead that I could not understand specific diplomatic negotiations without more knowledge of their background than I found ready to hand. In particular, I needed to know more of the growth of diplomatic institutions, of the uses they were designed for and the assumptions people made about them and of the spirit which gave them life.

So I was finally led to write, not the narrative of a particular embassy, but a general account of the development of Western diplomacy in its formative period. It seemed worth doing for two reasons. In the first place, although all civilizations of which we have any record have had some set of diplomatic institutions, ours took a turn some time after 1400 which differentiated it from all other sets in history. This new development seemed to me a characteristic symptom of the new power relations of the nascent modern world, and therefore possibly instructive about the period of history from which we are emerging, and about how people adapt their institutions in an age of change. In the second place, little proved to have been written, even for specialists, about the development of European diplomatic institutions before 1648, and of that little only a small fraction in English.{1}

Historians have argued so much about the Renaissance in recent years, and have so stretched and contracted and pulled about its meaning, that the word has fallen into a kind of disrepute. For some time I hesitated to use it in the title of this book, and called the manuscript, to myself, ‘The beginnings of modern diplomacy.’ But on reflection, ‘modern’ seemed as tricky a word as ‘Renaissance.’ Would not a reader be justified in expecting a book called ‘The beginnings of modern diplomacy’ to be about the San Francisco Conference or the founding of the League of Nations rather than about things that happened in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries? It seemed better, then, to use the only name we have for that period of Western history which begins with Petrarch and ends with Descartes or, in terms more appropriate for this study, begins with the emergence in northern and central Italy of the first purely secular states and ends with the failure of the last effort to re-impose a medieval unity on Europe.

The diplomacy of this period assumed its characteristic form between 1420 and 1530 in a time which we all call the Renaissance, however we may differ about the limits of the term. Resident embassies, the distinguishing feature, were an Italian invention. They were fully developed in Italy by the 1450’s and spread thence, like other Renaissance innovations, to the rest of Europe around 1500. And like other Renaissance innovations, they continued to develop along the lines laid down throughout the period which ended in 1914, so that their first stage may also properly be called the beginning of modern diplomacy. The new Italian institution of permanent diplomacy was drawn into the service of the rising nation-states, and served, like the standing army of which it was the counterpart, at once to nourish their growth and to foster their idolatry. It still serves them and must go on doing so as long as nation-states survive.

They may not survive forever. Technological progress, which made possible the nation-state system of the West, with its bitter rivalries and colonial empires, now promises to end it. We are experiencing another major change of phase, more rapid and violent than the Renaissance. We are again called on for creative adaptations, for inventiveness in political institutions and particularly in the machinery of international relations. It would be presumptuous to hope that this study could be of much use in so grave a task. But it may be some help to understand the beginning of the story before we come to its end.

Archival research for this book has been made possible by the generosity, at different dates, of Harvard University, of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and of the Columbia University Council for Research in the Social Sciences. During many years the patience and helpfulness of scores of librarians and archivists have laid upon me debts of gratitude which can receive here only the most general acknowledgment, but my especial thanks are due to Don Miguel Bordonau Mas, Inspector-General of the Spanish Archives, for the marked kindness and distinguished courtesy with which he assisted my last researches in Spain. Parts of several chapters of this book were discussed by the Columbia University Seminar in the Renaissance with, I hope, consequent improvement. I am grateful to Professor Felix Gilbert and Doctor Hans Baron for valuable suggestions, to Professor P. O. Kristeller for the constant benefit of his wide knowledge of Italian humanism, and to Professors Leo Gershoy and Edward C. Mack for their encouragement, and their criticism of the manuscript. My indebtedness to my friend Bernard DeVoto for help over many years with every phase of this study is greater than he realizes or than any dedicatory phrase could suggest. In its penultimate form, this book passed under the wise and kindly eye of Professor J. E. Neale, I hope to its advantage. In the research and in the writing, from first to last, my wife has had so large a share that this is really as much her book as mine.

Rome, March 15, 1954

GARRETT MATTINGLY

PART ONE — Medieval Diplomacy, Fifteenth Century

CHAPTER I — THE LEGAL FRAMEWORK

BY the first quarter of the fifteenth century the diplomatic institutions of the Latin West were already highly developed. Like the society they served, they were dynamic, not static. They had been changing with that society throughout the centuries since Western civilization had risen from the wreckage of the barbarian invasions. Like most Western institutions, they showed traces of ancient Germanic customs and of Byzantine and Islamic influence, but were mainly an adaptation to a new environment and new ends of the classical Mediterranean tradition as it had been preserved by the clergy of the Roman Catholic Church.

By 1300 the fusion of all these influences had long been completed, and the secular powers of Christendom had already learned all they could from the papacy about the machinery of diplomacy, as about other kinds of governmental machinery. After another century of development, Western secular diplomatic institutions were perhaps as highly elaborated as any previous set in history, although still plastic enough to be adapted to new uses. In fact, a good many early fifteenth-century rules, procedures and types of documents survived the disintegration of medieval Europe almost unchanged and may still be recognized in contemporary diplomatic practice, surprisingly little altered by the passage of five hundred years. During the transition from medieval to modern times, in diplomacy as in some other fields, formal institutions changed less than might have been expected. It was the objects of policy and the vision of society which changed.

Today coherent sense can be made out of medieval diplomatic institutions only by reference to the values they reflected. Looked at from a point of view which takes a jarring congeries of hostile sovereignties to be the natural order of the world, medieval ‘international law’ seems formless, and medieval diplomacy, in theory and practice, absurd. As formless and absurd it has generally been described, even by writers who ought to have known better. One finds even the wisest speaking with approval here of a paragraph of theory or there of a stroke of practice, as they recognize a similarity to the theory and practice of their own time, in the tone of adults praising the cleverness of precocious children. But the world of 1400 was not childlike. It merely retained different basic assumptions from those of the age which is now ending. Its institutions took different shapes from ours and its self-explanations used different words because, although swept forward in the grip of change, its articulate élite still clung to a different, an older style of thinking.

From the point of view of diplomacy the chief difference was that the West, in 1400, still thought of itself as one society. Christendom was torn by the gravest internal conflicts, by religious schism, doctrinal dispute, and the endemic warfare of class against class, people against people, faction against faction, king against king. But Latin Christendom still knew itself to be one.

This sense of unity compels recognition on even the most cursory study, yet it eludes precise and satisfactory statement. Modern attempts to define it are likely to seem pedantic and remote from actuality, like modern attempts at gothic architecture–at once alien to our daily world and unconvincing to specialists. This is the less surprising since throughout the period when Latin Christendom was a living reality, saints and philosophers, poets and propagandists were constantly seeking to capture in universal terms the essential quality of its unity, without ever winning the unqualified agreement of even a majority of their contemporaries.

The easiest thing to say about the unity of Christendom is that it was complex and protean, sensitive to change and adaptable to circumstances, so that it took on different aspects for different observers. It would never have been stated in quite the same terms or with quite the same emphasis in Italy as beyond the Alps, by a friar as by a parish priest, by a merchant as by a knight. Guelph and Ghibellines, canonists and civilians, realists and nominalists argued about it endlessly. It changed subtly in form and meaning for every generation between the Council of Clermont and the Council of Trent. To describe it as if it depended upon the functioning of some system of political or legal administration, or as if it ever attained, or even ever, as a whole, consciously sought to attain, to a given ideal as stated by St. Thomas or Dante or Nicholas of Cusa is to go surely wrong about it. But not so far wrong as it would be to deny that a belief in the actual unity of Christendom, however variously felt and expressed, was a fundamental condition of all medieval political thought and activity.

We shall understand medieval diplomatic conventions better, therefore, if we begin, not with the various magistrates, popes and emperors and kings, feudal lords and city states, among whom in complicated patterns allegiance was apportioned, but with the collective unity, the people. They had no common name for themselves except Christians. In their more tolerant moods they regarded the Jews among them as guests and strangers to be preserved until the Second Coming. They were willing, at times, to admit to their society the Greek Orthodox schismatics along their eastern frontier. Their theorists granted that even infidels, as the possessors of rational souls, could claim some place in the general community of mankind. But in general, the Latin West inclined to lump Jews, heretics, schismatics and pagans together as outsiders and natural enemies, while preserving, even in the bitterest internal quarrels, a sense of solidarity in one Catholic faith, a solidarity more intimate and complex in its ties than anyone quite knew how to express.

Besides thinking of themselves as Christians, the people of Latin Christendom also thought of themselves, more or less consciously, as Romans. No one had yet come to tell them that Rome had fallen a thousand years ago and given Europe over to the Goths; or that they were the Goths to whom it had been given over. It did not occur to their poets or to their legislators that Hector, Alexander and Julius Caesar were any more alien to their heritage than Arthur, Charlemagne and Godfrey of Bouillon, or than Joshua, David and Judas Maccabeus. Especially around the Mediterranean, where classical reminiscence was strongest, lawyers and Ghibelline intellectuals liked to speak of the people of Christendom as the Roman people, the populus romanus. But Germany also, even those parts of Germany where no Roman legion had ever tarried, knew its king as Roman emperor, and continued to elect him, on the plea that to allow the throne of Caesar and the temporal lordship of the world to pass by inheritance, like a farm, was unbecoming its peculiar dignity. Equally in France and Britain and Spain, where the kings acknowledged no imperial suzerain, men felt the tug of the imperial past, and traced their national histories to ancient Rome. Even in Ireland, and among Norwegian fiords, and on the Polish plain, literate Celts and Norse and Slavs whose ancestors had never seen the eagles thought of themselves as belonging somehow to the world, not merely of papal, but also of imperial Rome.

This sense of a common bond, political as well as religious, never found adequate expression in political institutions. The actual social structure of power, the difficulties of travel and communication, the confused pattern of local and regional differences prevented any such expression. The authority of the Holy Roman Empire, like the magical peau de chagrin, shrank every time an emperor invoked it, until finally it could hardly be stretched to cover more than the narrow hereditary domain of some German princeling. But the collapse of the empire and the schism of the papacy underlined a sense of unity which had never really depended on any fountainhead of authority, and the society for which pope and emperor alike were more important as symbols than as rulers found a name more definite than Christendom.

As the age of the great councils approached, one heard more frequently and with a wider reference of the Christian Commonwealth, the res publica Christiana. At Constance and at Basel the name was a battle cry to rally the enlightened against the divisive despotisms of Church and State. Its combination of Roman pride and Christian faith was more than a mere aspiration; it was almost a reality. In the documents of chanceries and the reasoning of lawyers, as well as in the exhortations of preachers and the dreams of scholars like Nicholas of Cusa, it stood for the common interests of the Community of Latin Christendom, interests which all men agreed were real and vital, however difficult it proved to give them practical political expression. As the watchword of those common interests the term res publica Christiana survived the failure of the councils, the Lutheran revolt, and the beginning of the Habsburg-Valois wars. The breaking-up of Christendom in the sixteenth century finally drained the Latin syllables of most of their meaning. But their nostalgic echo continued to haunt men’s consciences long after any actual Commonwealth of Christendom had ceased to be a possibility.{2}

If the res publica Christiana found no other political expression, it had achieved, by the last century or so of the Middle Ages, something like a common body of law. Or perhaps ‘achieved’ is not the right word. I he common body of law was not so much achieved as always assumed and increasingly realized,{3} the area of its most nearly complete realization being in the realm we now call ‘international’ law. This included, of course, ‘the international law of diplomacy,’ that is, the rules regulating the recognition and status of diplomatic principles, the behavior and immunities of diplomatic agents, and the negotiations, validity and observance of diplomatic agreements.

Like most medieval law, this diplomatic part of it escaped anything like systematic codification and derived its force not from formal acts, not from statutes or edicts or treaties, but from generally accepted principles and old-established customs. Since the West was not thinking in terms of mutually discrete, sovereign national states, but was trying to develop legal rules for a great society, the doctrine about the status and intercourse of princes, the position of ambassadors and the sanctity of treaties must usually be disengaged from a miscellaneous mass of commentaries and consilia on other matters. Like the sense of unity of which it was an expression, the ‘international law’ of the Middle Ages was stated with varying emphasis by different writers, and defies any precise definition which could have commanded universal acceptance at any period. Yet there is an unmistakable core of agreement. Coherently enough, and without serious contradiction, the available literature describes the framework within which medieval diplomatic institutions were elaborated and the climate of opinion in which their evolution towards modern forms began.

One can distinguish three converging currents of tradition: ecclesiastical, feudal and imperial, or, if one prefers, Christian, German and Roman, embodied in canon law, customary law and civil law.

The international character of canon law is immediately striking. It was co-extensive with the Roman obedience, and therefore with the res publica Christiana. It was administered by its own hierarchy of courts throughout Christendom. These courts claimed and on the whole successfully asserted, besides exclusive jurisdiction over the intellectual élite of the West, the clergy, concurrent jurisdiction over the laity as well in all matters involving the laws of God. Jurisdictional disputes between secular and ecclesiastical courts were frequent and bitter, but no Christian judge cared to contradict the divinely revealed mandates on which the laws of the Church claimed to be based. In fact, therefore, a good many legal relationships were governed, throughout the Roman obedience, by the doctrines and principles laid down by the Church lawyers. Thus, for medieval Europe canon law supplied, in large part, the need for a code of private international law.

In addition, since the eleventh century, the canonists had been preoccupied with many of the problems which we think of as belonging to public international law, with the definition of sovereignty, with the sanctity of treaties, with the preservation of peace, with the rights of neutrals and non-combatants, and with the mitigation of the rigors of war. From the beginning of the investiture controversy it had been to the advantage of the papacy to strengthen the independence of the kings against the universal claims of the emperor, and in the maxim that ‘each is master of his own house’ its lawyers found the basic principle of sovereignty which later led kings in France and England and Castile to assert that they were emperors in their own domains.

On the premise that the violation of an oath was a breach of the moral law, punishable by excommunication, the canonists had erected a whole theory of the sanctity of treaties, and of the use of spiritual arms to enforce them. Because of its concern with peace among Christians, the Church elaborated laws of war meant to mitigate the consequences of internal strife in Christendom, to distinguish between just and unjust wars, and to justify intervention against unjust breakers of the peace.{4} Finally, because of the European-wide nature of its interests, intensified in the thirteenth century by its bitter struggles with the emperors, the papacy had been the first Western power to make a systematic use of diplomacy. Consequently thirteenth-century canonists had begun to develop a set of rules about the status, conduct and privileges of papal diplomatic agents. These rules, though they were too specialized to admit of simple appropriation for secular diplomacy, were general enough to make their adaptation to secular use by the canon-law trained chancellors of Western princes practicably inevitable.

Naturally, the enforcement of the Church’s code of public international law met grave, and before long insuperable, difficulties. When the reformed papacy was at the height of its moral prestige, when enthusiastic monks and friars gave it an all-persuasive army of loyal and effective propagandists, even the toughest-minded monarchs flinched before the thunderbolts of Rome. Innocent III could actually appear what his successors long pretended to be, the suzerain of all earthly kings and arbiter of Christendom. But that was a brief moment. Within a century of Innocent’s death, the kings of Europe had learned that they could snub and defy popes with impunity whenever they could not seduce or coerce them. Nevertheless, the authority of the canon law survived. Neither the Avignonese captivity, nor the great schism, nor the subsequent ridiculous and horrifying spectacle of three popes, all cursing, vilifying and excommunicating each other, succeeded in quenching the feeling of the West that all Christians, laymen as well as clergy, ought to try to live together under the laws of God.

Meanwhile the lay society of Western Europe was working out rules for living together within the framework of its customary laws. Among the burghers, the lines of trade spread the good customs of one town to another, and tended to create something like the beginnings of a common law for the merchants and seamen of the West.{5} Even more markedly, the code of knightly behavior spread and generalized itself, and modified in doing so the law laid down by the church. Henry V and Philip the Good, John II of Castile and James I of Scotland, and all the lords and captains remembered by Froissart and Monstrelet followed, in principle at least, a common code of chivalry which regulated the formal intercourse of feudal overlords and their barons in peace, and especially in war. Although influenced by the teachings of the Church,{6} the chivalric doctrines of the just quarrel, the formal defiance, the good war, the treatment of heralds and prisoners and non-combatants, the summoning of towns and the observation of truces and treaties contained much matter not to be found in the canonists, and drew their real authority from their general acceptance of the military caste.

If the validity of the third element, Roman civil law, had depended on the enforcing power of the emperor, as modern writers are sometimes inclined to posit, civil law by the middle of the fifteenth century should have been the weakest of the three. The power of the emperors to enforce anything outside their hereditary estates and their ability to intervene efficiently in European affairs had never been less than in the anarchy of the early fifteenth century and the long, inglorious reign of Frederick III. In fact, however, the civil law as interpreted by its teachers in the universities was everywhere increasing in influence. In what we call the international law of the fifteenth century, Roman law was the most important element, the warp on which the legal garment of the great society was being constantly woven. In part, this was because Roman law appealed to the rulers of the West, not only by the handles it offered to absolute power but also as a generalized and rational system, adapted to the needs of a civil society, to secular authority, and to pecuniary interests. In part, it was because of the familiarity of the maxims which had served the canonists since the twelfth century and the lawyers of the feudal kings since the thirteenth. And in part, because, to Western sentiments of unity, civil law, backed by the traditions of imperial Rome, seemed even to the most zealous defenders of local customs the only possible and general code for governing the relations of the whole complex community which thought of itself as the Christian protraction of the Roman empire.{7}

Had the civil law remained a dead and rigid inheritance from the codifiers of sixth-century Byzantium it could never have fulfilled a vital function in the fifteenth-century world. But it was in no such danger. The most influential fourteenth-century jurists were eager to keep it living and flexible. Bartolus of Sassoferato,{8} who gave his name to the leading school, no more thought of the law he taught at Perugia as something fixed since the age of Justinian than he thought of the terse, serviceable Latin in which he wrote and lectured as a language fixed in the age of Augustus. Though he tried to connect his precepts with the great tradition of the Roman past, he shared and encouraged the interest of his practical-minded students in the actual law of their contemporary world. His followers, the Bartolists, continued throughout the fifteenth century his effort to assimilate into the civil law the teachings of the Church and the customs of the Italian cities and of the transalpine peoples, so as to provide a single rational body of doctrine for the legal relations of the Western world. This grandiose conception of the civil law scarcely survived the sixteenth century. But the Bartolists were so far successful that throughout the period of change officials employed in foreign affairs were expected to be trained in civil and canon law. Indeed, down into the last decades of the seventeenth century, men usually spoke of the civil law as if it were what we now call international law.{9}

The civilians could not have gained so much had there been any fundamental disagreement between them and the canonists, or between either and the feudalists. But, in fact, all three groups of lawyers were working with materials into which feudal customs, Christian morals, and Roman juristic thinking had been inextricably and almost imperceptibly interwoven. This convergence reflected the sentiments of a society which, through the intercourse of princes and knights, merchants and pilgrims, and by the long labors of the Church, was being molded into increasing unity in spite of its political diversity. It was in this harmony of sentiments that the ‘international law’ of the Middle Ages found its most effective sanction. For men, on the whole, were agreed that there must be a common body of law valid for all the Commonwealth of Christendom. And they were agreed, too, that finally everyone, even the kings, even the emperor, even the popes ought to be subject to this law.{10}

CHAPTER II — DIPLOMATIC PRINCIPALS AND DIPLOMATIC AGENTS

THE same sense of unity which led men to think of themselves as living in one society under the rule of a common law made it difficult for them to formulate a precise theory of diplomatic principals. The political realities of the later Middle Ages made it more difficult still. Our modern notion of an international society composed of a heterogeneous collection of fictitious entities called states, all supposed to be equal, sovereign and completely independent, would have shocked both the idealism and the common sense of the fifteenth century. Such a society would have seemed to philosophers a repulsive anarchy, a contradiction to their basic assumption of a hierarchically ordered universe-almost a blasphemy. And the concept would have been equally uncomfortable to practical statesmen. When, in fact, large parts of the political map of Europe presented an intricate puzzle of partial and overlapping sovereignties, who was to say which of them were to be granted and which denied the right of negotiating with others?

Kings made treaties with their own vassals and with the vassals of their neighbors. They received embassies from their own subjects and from the subjects of other princes, and sometimes sent agents who were in fact ambassadors in return. Subject cities negotiated with one another without reference to their respective sovereigns. Such behavior might arouse specific objection, but never on general grounds. The right of embassy was not spoken of in theory or regarded in practice as diplomatic representation, a symbolic attribute of sovereignty. It was a method of formal, privileged communication among the members of a hierarchically ordered society, and its exercise could be admitted or denied according to the relations of the parties concerned and the nature of the business in hand. The precise definition of a body of diplomatic principals had to wait for a revolution in men’s thinking about the nature of the state.

The evolution of a general theory of diplomatic principals, however, can be traced in the literature about diplomatic agents. In the thirteenth century, Gulielmus Durandus, long a leading canon law authority on the subject, could write, ‘A legatus [through the Renaissance about the commonest term for a diplomatic agent] is anybody sent by another.’ Durandus thus deliberately subsumed the highest ranking diplomats in Christendom, the papal legates a latere about whom he was writing, under a definition which included not only the representatives of princes, provinces and cites, but those of subordinate vassals and officials, and apparently, under the appropriate circumstances, those of any corporation or individual.{11} Practice bore him out. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, not only the princes and free cities of the empire, and the greater feudal nobles, but even merchant towns, even universities and craft guilds, sent formal quasi-diplomatic agents on occasion, apparently without anyone’s questioning their right to do so, or finding it odd to refer to them as ambassadors (legati), while the legists continued to discuss diplomatic agents under the same rubrics which dealt with all agents legally empowered to act for others.

Nevertheless, even as Gulielmus Durandus wrote, the actual European powers, the diplomatic principals of the future, were taking shape. Edward I and Philippe IV, Alfonso X of Castile and Jaime II of Aragon played the diplomatic game on a different scale and with different counters from petty feudal lords and bishops. And it was beginning to be recognized that while Florence and Venice, Genoa and even Lübeck might play in such a game, genuinely subject towns, even if they were London or Paris, could not. Strong monarchs after 1300 did not receive ambassadors from their subjects on equal terms or, except under the strongest compulsion, ambassadors from their rebels at all, and kings began to regard the reception of ambassadors from their own subjects by other rulers as a suspicious, if not a hostile, act.

Theory reacted to practice with less than its usual slowness. In Italy some city states once subject to the emperor or to the pope had, by the fourteenth century, clearly become sovereign and independent. A city of this class, said Bartolus, some seventy years after Durandus, was a prince in respect to itself, and, letting his eye wander further over Europe, he noted that rulers of the provinces of the empire who acknowledged no superior were equally ‘princes’ in their respective kingdoms. That is, such princes were, to use a cliché which Bartolus avoids, ‘emperors in their own domains.’{12}

The foundation stone of the modern theory of sovereignty was thus laid and, in the first course of the new structure, the beginnings of a new theory of diplomatic principals. Ambassadors, Bartolus said, are to be presumed genuine if they are sent by just and valid governments. He does not quite say who these just and valid authorities are, or go so far as to assert that only a lord who is in fact a prince is fully entitled to diplomatic representation. But his references relate his judgment to his general doctrine of the delegation of the imperial authority to the governors of provinces and cities, and his main line of reasoning is clear.{13} The practice of the 1350’s would scarcely have permitted a more definite statement.

Eighty years later, though the theoretical statement had been elaborated, it is still not much more definite, perhaps because practice was still far from clear cut. Noblemen like John of Gaunt and Louis of Orléans sent formally accredited ambassadors who were received at royal courts, by sovereign republics like Venice, and on occasion even by the pope, with